Film · 2012 · Films · 2010s
The Act of Killing
Scored from 134 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary goes to North Sumatra, where the men who carried out Indonesia's anti-communist mass killings of 1965-66 are still treated as heroes. Anwar Congo, once a ticket scalper outside a Medan cinema and later a death-squad leader who strangled victims with wire, agrees with his friend Herman Koto and other veterans of the paramilitary Pemuda Pancasila to restage their killings on camera in the genres they grew up on: gangster pictures, westerns, a musical number. Oppenheimer films the elaborate re-enactments and everything around them, including on-air boasting and the shakedown of local shopkeepers. As Anwar takes the part of his own victims, the play-acting starts to work on him.
The Act of Killing is a 2012 biography, crime and documentary film. It plays in Indonesian. It runs 1h 57m. Its country of origin is listed as Denmark, Norway and the United Kingdom.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 469 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 134 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 138 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 13,058 2010s films, not against the whole corpus.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where The Act of Killing lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 2010s (13,059 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 134.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
